1

It’s been a hard go of watching movies as of late because the wife has gotten deeply invested in Dimension 20 on Dropout.TV. So any free moment the both of us have had has gone into watching that. But I do, occasionally, get her to want to watch something else other than really rad improv comedians doing Dungeons & Dragons for two-and-a- half hours at a time! That’s how we recently ended up watching this new Shudder offering, 825 Forest Road. 

And you know how much we love Shudder!

825 Forest Road is the tale of a small family–married couple Chuck and Maria, along with Chuck’s younger sister Isabelle–who move out of the city and into a new home in the suburbs of a town called Ashland Falls.

They quickly find out that the town has a a dark history, though, and that a woman committed horrible and violent acts decades prior after the death of her daughter due to bullying.

MORE MOVIES FROM STEW!

In the intervening years, Ashland Falls has been abuzz with paranormal activity, and there was a second major crisis that occurred when the town seemed to determine to unseal old records (oh yeah, part of the mystery is that the town changed all of the street names and addresses after the initial carnage, so no one knows where the mayhem actually took place; that’s why an address is the title of this movie). Chuck, Maria, and Isabelle are dealing with their own recent devastation, though, and they initially are too caught up in their own events to worry about a new town’s bogeyman. 

When the town’s curse seems to catch up with Chuck’s family, they each experience and react to it in different ways. Will they survive? Or are they destined to be part of Ashland Falls’ next catastrophe?

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ The non-sequitor storytelling metes out information in a deliberate fashion and keeps the plot feeling fresh. 825 Forest Road is told across four chapters rather than three acts, and each time a chapter starts (excluding the fourth one), we are treated to a rewinding of time so that we can get another character’s perspective and goings-on during moments we have already seen. This keeps the viewer on the edge of their seat as they are left waiting to see what ultimate reveals there might be. It also allows fairly innocuous lines of dialogue to eventually mean more than they seem like they do.

Chuck, Isabelle, and Maria each get their own chapter showing their life in their new home. And each chapter shows things getting more and more dire and in-your-face as the haunting affects each of them differently. It’s not a brand new storytelling convention by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s used very effectively here to keep the movie perpetuating a sense of dread. 

+ The scares and the creepiness work well enough, and the movie has a solid horror atmosphere. The movie incorporates a lot of different horror devices across its run time. There are jump scares, atmosphere building, reveals… a lot of different ways to build the drama of eeriness as 825 Forest Road moves along. You can tell the creators really knew what they were doing, and they are professionals at executing horror elements. 

– The acting is mediocre. It’s certainly not painfully bad or anything, but it just isn’t as strong as the storytelling conventions. The characters are believable, but only so much so. It’s unfortunate; having so recently watched and covered Bordello Of Blood for the podcast, I kind of hate critiquing anyone’s acting because it’s all surely better than whatever Angie Everhart was doing in that flick. But the efforts here just don’t match up to everything else.

I also just legitimately don’t like faulting actors for their performances. Maybe because they are the Face of the movie and I feel more sympathy for them than I do the more nebulous and vacant concept of “editor” or what-have-you. But yeah, the acting here just didn’t sell me on the importance of the story the movie was telling, and that’s unfortunate. 

– The ending is sudden after a fourth chapter that seems to drag on its way to the reveal you kind of know is coming (or a version of it anyway). After such effective first three chapters, the climactic one seems to creep along slowly and be unsure of when it should reveal what. You get extended scenes of Chuck and Isabelle talking and driving and looking around. All while Maria is starting to act creepy back at their home. It left me feeling a sense of… “get on with it”, I guess… as the film crept towards its conclusion.

And that conclusion itself hits like a bag of bricks falling on you. Without getting into any spoiler specifics, it’s there, it happens, and then the film has an abrupt ending into the credits. It again created an unsatisfactory feeling within me as I wanted something a bit more tactful or resolved or definitive.

It’s just a strange juxtaposition. The fourth chapter seems to meander along, but then it ends out of the blue and both aspects felt like poor rewards for how well the rest of the outing had developed. 

OVERALL

If the fourth chapter had been less of a letdown, this score would be much higher. As it is, you have a movie that is 75% highly effective and well-told, with behind-the-camera talents who clearly know what they are doing. But then it all crashes down just a bit when the chips are down and it’s time to pay everything off. Combine that with some acting that just isn’t particularly blowing anyone away, and you are left with a Below Average overall score for an effort that had a lot of early promise. 

★★ Out Of 5